God Is Love | In light of love | 1 John 4:7–12 | Ep.14

Welcome to Preaching from Bryanson Bible Church, located in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, South Africa.

It is our prayer that this teaching would bless you, deepen your love for God's word, and encourage you as you follow Jesus.

And if you are not a Christian, we pray that this message would encourage you as you explore the Christian faith.

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.

Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.

In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.

In this is love, not that we have loved God, that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins.

Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

No one has ever seen God.

If we love one another, God abides in us, and his love is perfected in us.

Good morning, BBC.

It's such a joy to be with you.

I can remember back when I was a child and I used to have lots of questions, and I can remember one particular question that I used to enjoy asking my dad.

I said, Dad, how come all of the songs on the radio are about love?

And my dad didn't really have an answer, but I think that that's a question worth still reflecting on even today.

Why do we never stop talking about love?

I mean, we celebrate love, we sing about love, we write poems about love, we make movies about love.

We are afraid of love at times, we build our lives around love.

Sometimes we will even be willing to sell our souls for love.

Underneath all of our human divisions and all of our human differences, we all have this one thing in common.

We want to be loved.

We just want to be loved.

There's a haunting story about a girl by the name of Lynette Squeaky from.

Squeaky was her nickname.

And she was one of the followers of the notorious Charles Manson.

As a teenager, she felt like a misfit.

She felt unwanted by her family, by society.

And so she joined the Charles Manson cult.

And many years later, she was asked why she had been willing to follow this particular Manson cult.

This is what she said.

I decided when I was 14 years old that whoever loved me first could have my life.

Whoever loves me first can have my life.

That's how deep this longing goes.

We want someone to see us, someone to choose us, somebody just to tell us that we matter.

And because we want to be loved so desperately, we can mistake attention for love, approval for love, belonging for love, even control, we can confuse for love.

But it's not just that we long for love, there's something else that we recognize about love, and that is that across centuries and across cultures, we love to tell stories about sacrificial love.

The king who gives his life, the prince who comes and slays the dragon, the beast who is transformed by love.

Both C.S.

Lewis, the great Christian author, and J.R.R.

Tolkien, who I'm sure you know is the author of Lord of the Rings, those two guys had these kind of deep discussions.

A similar kind of question to what I asked my dad.

And they wondered as they discussed this together, could it be that all of the fairy tales and fables that we've told down through the centuries are in fact echoes of something true, echoes of a greater story.

And Christianity says, what if the echo is real?

What if?

What if the reason we keep telling stories about sacrifice is because sacrificial love is at the heart of the reality of the universe?

Christianity makes an astonishing claim.

It says that the greatest love story is not just a story, it actually happened.

It actually happened.

God entered our story.

The author stepped onto the stage of his story and he sent his son, the Lord Jesus Christ.

And that brings us to 1 John chapter 4 as we continue on in our series in the letters of John.

1 John 4 · chapter mention

And as we come to chapter 4, John doesn't do a Whitney Houston on us.

What do I mean by that?

He doesn't tell us that the greatest love of all is inside of us.

John wants to tell us that love is from God.

It comes from God.

Love has a source, love has an origin, and it doesn't begin with us.

And so perhaps the reason we cannot stop talking and singing about love is because whether we realize it or not, we're talking about something that ultimately comes from far beyond ourselves.

And then John will say a bit later in chapter four something astonishing.

He says, We love because he first loved us.

He first loved us.

Before we ever searched for God, he came looking for us.

Before we ever reached out for him, he reached out to us.

The love we seek comes from a God who loves us first.

And so I want us to look at three things this morning.

I want us to look at the source of love.

I want us to look at the proof of love, and I want us to look at the reflection of love.

The source of love, the proof of love, and the reflection of love.

So let's dive in.

Number one, the source of love.

Verse 7.

John writes, Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God.

And he begins the section with a wonderful word.

It's the word beloved.

John is practicing what he preaches as a good preacher.

He's saying to the people that he wrote to, I love you.

I want you to know that you are loved by me, not just by God, but you are my beloved.

And in these short six verses we're going to look at, John uses the word for love 15 times.

15 times he wants us to understand this profound truth that love is from God.

And then in verse 8 he says, Anyone who does not love does not know God.

Because God is love.

God is love.

In other words, love is not merely something God does.

It's not external to God.

It's not kind of even just one of his attributes that you can kind of strip out.

No, John is saying God is intrinsically in his essence, in his nature.

He is love.

But this is not everything that the scriptures have to say about God.

So yes, God is love, but he's not only love.

Remember back in chapter one, John told us that God is light.

So God is holy, he is righteous, he is perfect.

And I want you to notice what John doesn't say.

He doesn't say love is God.

He says God is love.

And why does that make a difference?

He's saying love doesn't define God, God defines love.

And so we often reverse this.

We say, well, if you were a loving God, you wouldn't allow suffering.

If you were a loving God, you wouldn't, you would just affirm everything that I do.

If you were a loving God, you would never judge.

And so what do we do?

We take our definition of love and we project it onto God and we judge God based upon our definition of love.

And John says, No, I'm turning that around.

God is love.

And so if you want to know what love is, don't start with yourself, start with God.

And because God is holy, his love is also holy.

It is a holy love.

That means it's a love that will also challenge you, a love that will confront you.

Yes, God loves you as you are, but he loves you too much to let you stay as you are.

His love is a transforming love.

And then John says something searching at the end of verse 7.

He says, Whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.

Now John isn't saying that anyone who does something loving is therefore automatically a Christian.

In the context here, this is not a blanket statement.

John's writing to believers, there's a context here.

But what he is saying is that if you have experienced the God of love, then that kind of love has to be evident in your life.

It's a sign that you've been born of God, it's a sign that you know God.

A child doesn't have to try hard to resemble their parents.

Why?

Because the DNA is built in.

If you've been born of God, that DNA is in you.

And so if you know God, that love will become evident in your life.

Imagine saying, I know the ocean, but I've never encountered water.

Imagine saying, I know fire, but I've never encountered heat.

It doesn't make sense.

Something of the source always becomes evident when you encounter it.

And so you cannot truly know the God who is love and remain unchanged in the way that you love others.

Not perfect love, but genuine love, real love.

Because lovelessness cannot be the settled direction of somebody who claims to know God.

And that brings us to a very uncomfortable question on Heritage Sunday.

What happens when people who claim to know this God of love refuse to love people who are different from them?

And that's perhaps one of the greatest contradictions in our South African history.

It's that Christianity was used to justify apartheid.

Just think about that.

If God is love as John says he is, then there's something profoundly incompatible, in fact, blasphemous about using the name of God to treat another human being as less than human simply because of the color of their skin.

And why do I use such a strong word as blasphemous?

Because blasphemy isn't only saying something bad about God, blasphemy is also taking God's name and attaching it to something that contradicts who God has actually revealed Himself to be.

Justifying apartheid in the name of Christianity wasn't simply a distortion of how we saw one another, it was a distortion of who we said God is.

And the answer to a distorted Christianity is not less Christianity, it's a deeper recovery of true biblical Christianity, the gospel that we see in Christ, that God is a God who loved us first by moving across, moving across every boundary to come to us and to call us to Himself and to enable us to love one another.

So that's the source of love.

Love comes from God.

But number two, the proof of love.

John now tells us what God's love looks like.

Here it is in verse 9.

In this the love of God was made manifest among us.

That God sent his only son into the world so that we might live through him.

God's love is not merely an idea, it's not some abstract concept, it's not just a warm, fuzzy feeling, sentiment, and God just sort of says, Hey, I love you all.

No, God's love became visible, it became measurable, it became there for us to see in time, in space, in history.

It became visible because God sent his only son into the world.

And if you want to see what God's love looks like, you look at Jesus.

You look at Jesus.

And John tells us three things about this love.

He says that it's an initiating love.

God takes the initiative, he came looking for you.

Remember squeaky from.

Whoever loves me first can have my life.

And I remember when I first came across that story as a youth pastor and thinking, Lord, how many other 14-year-olds are there out there who are saying that, who will just give their life away to any person that comes along and offers them love?

Lord, may we get to them first.

May the gospel reach them because Lord, you reached us first.

Look at verse 10.

And this is love.

Not that we have loved God.

That's not what it's about.

It's not that we have loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son.

You didn't make the first move.

God made the first move.

You weren't crying out to heaven saying, Hey, we need a Savior.

You didn't send to God, He sent to us while we were still sinners.

Christ died for us.

He sent His Son.

He came searching for you when you were not searching for Him.

And this is what makes the gospel such good news.

Our salvation doesn't begin with our love for God, it doesn't begin with my love for God, it begins with His love for me and His love for you.

It's an initiating love, but it's also an undeserved love.

He loved you before you were lovable.

Let that sink in.

He loved you before you were lovable.

And notice the kind of people Jesus loved, not those who had cleaned up their act.

How often do we do that?

You know, I'll get right with God, but let me just first clean up my act.

No, Jesus loved his enemies.

He loved rebels, he loved sinners.

He didn't love those who had somehow earned his favor and he said, Okay, you guys have done enough for me now to come to earth and save you.

Not a chance.

We were looking the other way.

G.K.

Chesterton, that famous British author, once reflected on the fairy tale that we know is beauty and the beast.

And he said something profound about this fairy tale, as a literary genius as he was.

But this is what Chesterton said.

There is the great lesson of beauty and the beast.

That a thing must be loved before it is lovable.

That a thing must be loved before it is lovable.

Brothers and sisters, just reflect on God's grace.

That you became lovable because of his love.

The beast didn't clean up his act.

He wasn't loved because he was lovable.

He's loved, and it's that very love that transforms him.

That's what John says in verse 10 not that we have loved God, but that he loved us.

God didn't love you because you were lovable, he loved you before you had anything to offer him.

You were dead in transgressions and sins.

And the last time I checked, dead people cannot make themselves alive.

Think about the billions of dollars that are spent on trying to make ourselves lovable.

Think about it.

What you spray on, what you wear, making sure that that profile picture before it goes live is taken from exactly the right angle.

So that it's flattering, not fattering.

That's a picture of God's love.

His love is not a reward for us being lovable, not at all.

That's why this quote from Charles Hodge, a theologian from a couple of hundred years ago, is so profound and moving.

This is what Hodge says.

If God loved us because we loved him, he would love us only so long as we love him, and then our salvation would depend on the constancy of our treacherous hearts.

But because God loved us as sinners, because Christ died for us as ungodly, our salvation depends not on our loveliness, but on the constancy of the love of God.

Can I get an amen?

Is that not the wonder of grace?

That we've experienced an initiating love, we've experienced an undeserved love, and we've experienced a sacrificial love.

He gave himself for you, holding nothing back.

God gave his best, his one and only Son.

Here it is in verse 10 again.

And this is love.

Not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins.

Now, propitiation is a big word.

Pastor Mike took us through this word back in uh 1 John chapter 2, and he unpacked it beautifully.

1 John 2 · chapter mention

Essentially, what propitiation means is that on the cross, the Lord Jesus Christ absorbed the wrath of God in himself, the wrath that we should have endured for our sins, and he paid that price on our behalf.

And so at the cross we see both God's love and God's holiness displayed.

God doesn't simply overlook sin, he deals with it by giving himself and holding nothing back, sacrificial love.

Jesus knew what he was walking towards.

He knew Peter would deny him.

He knew that the soldiers would come.

Jesus knew that the cross was on its way, that there would be mocking, that there would be spitting, that there would be taunts and insults.

He looked at that cross, he saw the Father's wrath against sin, and you know what?

He still went willingly.

He still went willingly.

This is love.

Not merely love that speaks, not merely love that feels, but love that gives everything.

And notice the purpose in verse 9.

So that we might live through him.

Jesus died that we might live, that we might be who are dead, made alive, that we would be alive to God, alive to his love, alive to life itself, because we've tasted the very reality of the universe.

And so the perhaps the question for some of us this morning isn't whether God loves us.

Maybe you'd say to me, Justin, I've heard that a thousand times since I was this small in Sunday school.

So then I say to you, maybe the reality today that you need to grasp is, do you believe it?

Do you believe that you are loved by God?

That as you leave this place, as you go into the mess of Monday, do you believe that God loves you even there?

The old Puritan pastor John Owen captured this when he wrote, the greatest sorrow and burden you can lay on the Father, the greatest unkindness you can do to him, is not to believe that he loves you.

It's to not to believe that he loves you.

So if you ever wonder what God's love looks like, don't begin with your feelings, which are up and down.

Don't begin with your circumstances, which one day are wonderful and the next day not.

Look at the cross.

The cross is the proof of God's love.

The cross is the greatest demonstration of love that we've ever seen on planet earth.

The cross says, I loved you first.

The cross says, I loved you before you were lovable.

The cross says, I gave myself and I give myself for you.

And our love is always a response to that love.

We love because he first loved us.

So we've looked at the source of love.

Love is from God, we've looked at the proof of love, the cross.

Now we come to look thirdly and finally at the reflection of love.

John now takes us from God's love for us to our love for one another.

Here it is in verse 11.

Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

He's saying, brothers, the love we have received from God is now the love that we give.

And then verse 12 no one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

No one has ever seen God.

No one can see the wind, but we can see the effects of the wind, and we can see the effects of God.

That means someone who walks into BBC may never see God, but they can see the effects of God among us.

They can see that through our love for one another, the invisible God becomes visible.

And when the invisible God fills his people with love for one another, that love becomes manifest.

And that is why this matters so much on Heritage Sunday.

I want you to look around, look at what God has done across BBC.

Look at what he's done across BBC.

Different races, different cultures, different personalities, different temperaments, different histories, different backgrounds, different age.

And yet we worship together, we pray together, we eat together, we serve one another together, and we call one another family.

In a historically divided South Africa where we were taught to fear one another, to exclude one another, what greater evidence could there be in our land of South Africa of the transforming power of the gospel than for the gospel to unite brothers and sisters in Christ around the very same things that divided us?

We didn't orchestrate this.

This is of God.

This is what He's been building among us here at BBC, and it is beautiful to behold because if you think of a choir, every voice is different.

Every voice has a different range, a different tone, a different strength.

But when they brought together, that choir sounds more than any one voice could ever produce.

The beauty isn't found in making every voice sound the same.

All sing in unison, all sound the same.

No, the beauty of a choir is found in different voices coming together, the sum greater than the parts, singing the same song.

Singing the same song.

And laws and political regimes can change, but they cannot create the kind of gospel love that we're talking about.

That makes people from different backgrounds say, You are my brother, you are my sister, you belong here, you are family.

Only the gospel can do that, and something supernatural has happened.

Let's pinch ourselves and say the Lord has done something supernatural in our country and in our midst through the gospel.

God is taking people across, across the dividing walls of hostility that Ephesians 2 talks about and making us one in Christ.

I want you to think for a moment just how extraordinary this is.

And I hope I don't insult you by saying this, but you have more in common with an ant than you do with God.

You have more in common with an ant than you do with God.

If I can I really hit it home, you have more in common with a hardy dar than you do with God.

And I have to say I don't like hardy dars.

Why do I say that?

Because the disparity between you and God, humanity and God is an infinite disparity.

There's actually, if you measure that, hardly any difference between me and an ant.

That difference is microscopic.

We're both created beings, and yet God loved you so much that he was willing to step across an infinite gulf to rescue you.

So do you see the contradiction?

If God was willing to travel an infinite gulf, then how can you and I not walk across the room?

How can we draw the line at race?

At your background is different to mine.

We can't.

This is John's radical logic.

Love is from God, love is demonstrated in Christ, and love becomes visible through us because what did he say in verse 12?

If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

So as we close, perhaps that's why we've always loved these stories.

Cinderella gets welcomed into the palace.

Sleeping beauty, awakened by the prince.

Hansel and Gretel brought home.

That's us.

That's us in our weary rags.

That's us lost in the woods.

That's us locked in the tower, unable to escape.

That's us, spellbound under the curse of sin.

That's us longing for someone to come and to rescue us.

And so we tell stories about princes who come.

But I'm here to declare today on Heritage Sunday: once upon a time, a prince really did come.

There really is a king who came looking for you.

There really is a love that reaches us when we were undeserving.

There really is a death that defeats death.

There really is a resurrection.

There really is a grand ball where we are invited to sit at the wedding feast.

The Prince of Peace came looking for you.

He saw beyond your beastly appearance, marred by sin.

And he loved you enough to die for you.

And here is the great reversal in the gospel that the only true and beautiful one came and became like one of us.

No, he became the beast, disfigured on a cross.

Because he took his our sin upon us, our shame upon us.

The one who had every right to remain in the glories and the safety of heaven entered our broken world and he did it because he loved you.

So the story is true.

The prince has come, the dragon has been defeated, the lost are being found, the orphans are becoming sons and daughters, the dead will be raised, and the bride is being prepared for the wedding.

And one day that story will be complete.

And the same John that wrote these words gives us a glimpse of what that completed story will look like.

Here it is on that great day, Revelation 7:9.

Revelation 7:9

After this, I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages standing before the throne and before the Lamb.

Every tribe, every people, every tongue.

One king, one lamb, one song, one people.

No more death, no more mourning, no more crying, no more hostility, no more hatred.

We will see the king and we'll discover that God's love was far greater than any of us ever imagined.

And so perhaps there are no better words for me to end the sermon on than this old great hymn.

Here it is on the screen.

Could we with ink the ocean fill?

And where the skies of parchment made, where every stalk on earth a quill, and every man a scribe by trade, to write the love of God above would drain the ocean dry, nor could the scroll contain the whole, though stretched from sky to sky.

Friends, the fairy tale is true.

Indeed, we rarely do live happily ever after.

Let's pray together.

Thank you, as Spurgeon said, that you are the hound of heaven who pursues us even when we are running in the opposite direction.

I pray that your love would melt our hearts, Lord.

Lord, that we wouldn't turn to lesser loves, that we realize that you have loved us first.

Everything we had ever looked for in a perfect relationship or perfect love is found in you.

Lord, help that love to satisfy our souls, that as we leave this place today we may rejoice, Lord, in your love for us and also what your love has done in us and through us in this very church.

And so, Lord, as we go into this time now of baptism, we thank you for each of these candidates.

We thank you that your grace is intersected with their lives, that you met them, and that as they go through these waters today, they are declaring that they know you and that they love you because you first loved them.

I pray, Lord, for strength for them as they go out into this week that you would keep them from the evil one, that their testimonies and their stories would be a blessing to everybody that they come into contact with.

And may we celebrate and rejoice with them as we see dead raised to life before our very eyes in this beautiful picture of baptism.

And so we pray this all in your name.

Amen.

Thanks for listening to this sermon from BBC.

If you have questions about what you've heard or would like to find out more about the Christian faith, we'd love to hear from you.

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God bless you.